


Until

by snazzlezazzle



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Did I Mention, M/M, Such angst, because i write angsty fanfic, kinda I suppose, pretentious wrting, this is why i cant have nice things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-02-20 22:28:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2445434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snazzlezazzle/pseuds/snazzlezazzle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a word here, used so oft in stories like these; <em>until.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Until

Grantaire never thought he was special, which was almost the precise reason he was. Every person has a premonition of greatness, a far-off land where they have seas of admiring fans throwing roses at their feet, or a feeling of haunting grandeur, the sense that they could be- and that they would be something uniquely better than everyone around them.

Grantaire never had a sense of that; more, he was, not contented, but resigned to a life of mediocrity, always being a middle value in a set of numbers.

He thought that wishing for people to listen and heed your will was like trying to light a match by rubbing two fingertips together. It wasn't as if he was blinded to the good and the great in this world, just he chose to turn his head away and drop his eyes.

A cynic, Grantaire was, well and true, a skeptic and a nihilist and all the words for a nonbeliever that have and will be spoken. Why should he look to the stars when the rock was cracked and split beneath his feet? Why should things change? They were surely as good as they were ever going to be.

He was, in some people’s opinion, the perfect problem.

Intelligent enough to know right from wrong, outspoken enough, when the mood took him, to voice his thoughts and talented enough to go somewhere. _But where?_ Grantaire would always ask, _Where shall I go? You see, what I need is right here, and what I need is what I want, so whyever would I choose to leave?_ At this point, most people would walk off, frustrated, or too uncaring to pursue the topic any further and Grantaire would take a long pull of what he was drinking that day, and slump backwards to his seat.

And so, life went on, time measured by the bottles stacked on the table and the sketchbooks completed beside him.

There's a word here, one that is used so oft in stories like these; _until_.

Until, one day, until that moment it was dull, much like the rest of Grantaire’s misbegotten life. Something happened.

This, in and of itself, was out of ordinary.

Extraordinary.

**

A group of people burst through the door and into the café. They buzzed and hummed with the energy and alacrity of youth, and settling on a table in a corner, talking and laughing amongst themselves. They were every creed and colour, from the deepest black skin of a heavily muscled man to the palest white from a stoically beautiful man. They seemed to bear the movements of a thunderstorm, fizzing static seeming to break against Grantaire’s skin with their entrance.

Grantaire side eyed them, hand around a bottle neck. The beautiful man caught him looking and frowned, creasing lines in his wonderful face, obviously not seeing Grantaire, but the bottles that surrounded him. Even as Grantaire dropped his eyes to the wooden surface of his table and the back of his neck burned with blood blush, a subtle element of relief intruded. It was how it had always been before; people did not see him, but what surrounded him, what he carried, his actual self slipping constantly under their radars.

He brought the bottle to his mouth and drank deeply, the alcohol did not trail fire down his throat as it used to, but rather just flowed, as normal a liquid as water. The only thing that showed him to be drinking alcohol was the slight unsteadiness to his hands as he placed the bottle back on the table.

Tracing a knot in the wood, he darted a look from lidded eyes to the vibrant table in the opposite corner.

The blond man was not looking at him. None of them were. A tiny sense of disappointment made itself known under the fog of his tipsiness. They talked and laughed and smiled like they were the only thing in the world that mattered to each other. Family.

An ache appeared in the region under his breastbone, pulsing unpleasantly. Grantaire took another swig to soothe the pain. Family was one thing that he truly never had. He was somewhat the black sheep of his blood relations, his siblings more lively and personable than he ever was, making the attention granted to him ever smaller as the years went by as he grew and needed less from his parents; he often flitted as though a ghost throughout the house, feeling pale and drab compared to his brother and sister. It was not as though his parents _did_ anything to him, never even raised their voices, it was that they didn't seem to care. Sometimes, in the morning, when Grantaire came down to breakfast, eyes heavy and limbs sleep addled, he would get an nasty jolt when his parents’ eyes turned to him with genuine surprise, almost _who are you again?_

It was not a bad childhood per se, more like a forced feralness, even so, Grantaire grew as curled in on himself as the tangled roots of a yew tree. It was really true what some people said: indifference was worse than open hatred. Hatred one could combat, could seize in two hands and bring crashing down, but indifference, indifference was as difficult to change as trying to force the seas to retreat. In other words, it simply couldn't be done; unless the seas themselves retreated.

The corner of Grantaire’s mouth tugged downwards in a half frown, the group had stopped talking, but the blond man began to speak words full of light and ice and fire. He spoke of revolution, of overthrowing the rule and raising up people to fight for a cause, to cause change. He spoke of the injustices and the violence and corruption, with eyes full of passion and sharp, self-important gestures darting this way and that.

Grantaire was not truly listening to this tirade, more letting it wash over him in a barrage of words, until something caught his attention. His skin twitched, and his hand tightened involuntarily on his bottle. His focus sharpened and adjusted to the light, removing his eyes from the gloom of his little corner, partially clearing some of the wine from his brain.

“Everybody’s unique,” the blond man stated in a haze of fervour, ramming the tip of his index finger on the table with each word, eyes alight. He was beautiful, shimmering, ethereal. Grantaire was caught in his flame like a moth. “Nobody in this world is ordinary. We are all special, in one way or another.” His friends seemed to be drinking in these words as one might drink in oxygen, as if they were necessary to survival, eyes fixed on the spectacle of the man.

He was beyond words, this glorious man. This naïve, hopelessly optimistic man. However untrue his speech, this was better than any spirit or liquor.

Shocking himself almost breathless with his audacity, still half-ensnared in the tangle of heat the man’s words inspired, Grantaire raised his voice over the other man’s, hoarse with disuse. “I think you're missing half that quote,” all of their eyes flicked to him, waiting, the blond man’s mouth dropped slightly in disdain, “’Everybody’s unique, but nobody is special.’ I believe is the entire quote.”

Muttering broke out in the ranks of the group, a small ginger haired man smiled behind his hand to a dark skinned one, and he laughed a deep booming laugh. The one sat beside the blond man had a tiny smirk on his face, but his eyes were placid behind his owlish glasses with an excitable looking fellow giggling beside him.

The divine man flicked his blond curls from one eye, irritation plain on his face. “A half quote it may be,” he said, glaring at Grantaire, “but the words hold more truth than the full one. Indeed, with everyone being as they are, driving towards a common goal, we could change the world.”

Grantaire leaned forwards on his table, displacing a few bottles with a clatter, gaze sharpening, “Very well, Apollo,” the blond man blinked in shock, “what if you worked with tiny, pretty little shells. Each shell had little different stripes or spots on it in different colours.”

“I don't see your point.”

“Wait, wait. I'm sure you'll get it in due course. So, each group of these little shells are in a bottle, sealed in by old corks. Each time you pull on an old cork, the corks either crack, making it impossible to free the shells, or you pull too hard, and the shells scatter everywhere. They don't land in the palm of your hand, Apollo. It doesn't matter that the shells are brightly or differently coloured. They all go in different directions, or follow the same distinct style. Much like sheep I suppose.” Grantaire finished, punctuating the end of his little lecture with a drink from his bottle.

The man scraped his hair back against his head, frustrated and annoyed, a wayward curl breaking free from his grasp, like foam in a Grecian sea. Grantaire’s eyes tracked the fall of the curl.

“But, even if some of these shells-” Apollo made quotation marks in the air with his hands. One of his friends giggled behind their long ginger hair, eyes sparkling. “Land in the palm of my hand, it's surely better than have them all trapped and useless within the bottle.”

With this pronouncement, Apollo’s eyes flashed meaningfully and disdainfully to the bottle held loosely in the curve of Grantaire’s hand, shoulders dropping towards the table.

Grantaire snorted. “But freedom for some isn't freedom for all, Apollo. Uniqueness for some isn't uniqueness for all. You should know that. You've defeated your point simply by making it.” He waved his hand in a circle lethargically, removing it from the bottle. “You've burnt that bridge before you came to it, so to speak.”

Those electric blue eyes glimmered with a strong dislike, brought to seething discontent by the muttering of the person next to him; “He’s got you there,” the man said, pushing his wide-framed glasses back up his nose. Apollo sniffed haughtily, and Grantaire watched the delicate flare of his nostrils with an intensive focus, the expand and contract of the muscle of his face more engaging than any soap opera.

“Very well,” Apollo hissed, eyes narrowing, fury plain on the elegant lines of his face. He seemed more incensed at the fact that Grantaire had defeated him in an argument, more than the argument itself. “But how does a drunk like you know the way of this world, and how do you know anything of substance at all? You are simply a wine skin with a brain.”

Grantaire blinked. He had not expected such a response. Some light must have pierced the darkness of his corner, because the man looked suddenly taken aback.

Shoving the broken edges of his feelings further into the shredded mess of his belly, Grantaire purposefully drew his chair into the light of the rest of the café, dragging his eyes over the expensive cloth of Apollo’s clothes, the healthy shade of his skin, his neat, clean bag. Grantaire put a foot in the strap of his ratty bag, and too, dragged it out of the shadows.

After the scrape and rattle and thump of the movement was complete, there was silence. He felt them look at him, over his torn, paint stained jeans, his old, faded shirt, the looseness and pallor of his skin. The silence was so thick Grantaire could taste it on his tongue. Blood-blush highlighted Apollo’s cheekbones. His friends looked on - judging, the soft hush of their whispers breaking, like sea waves, on his arms. The fine hair on Grantaire’s arm lifted under their scrutiny.

He held Apollo’s eyes, cocking an eyebrow. “Must be nice to afford a postgrad.”

Apollo’s cheeks were red with blood-blush, cold fury breaking in the wake of Grantaire’s words.

Weary, and suddenly feeling sober; Grantaire pulled himself to his feet, drawing them up and under his body, like he had done so many times before, on this very spot.

“If you are quite done, Apollo,” Grantaire slung his bag over his shoulder and cradling his sketchbooks to his chest - as one might a child - he drew a hand over his face, the word ’Apollo’ muffled by his left palm, “this wine skin will use his brain and leave, for tonight.”

Grantaire began to leave, but suddenly turned, halting the murmur of conversation that was beginning to drift from Apollo’s corner. Shakily, he grabbed at the bottle neck, pouring the dregs of it into his mouth, with a seemingly desperate intensity. An unpleasant smile lifted one side of his lips - lopsided, wrong. He placed the bottle down on his chair roughly, and lifted his eyes to Apollo’s, who had yet to sit down. Electricity, lightning, whipped between them.

“It seems to me you won't notice the difference, good sir.”

With this, Grantaire finally left, the chime of the bell obscenely cheerful in the ensuing quiet.

Apollo - though he was but a man, not a god - stared at the bottle, watching how the light refracted, clear as a green leaf in summer, off the glass of it. It was silent, though the buzz of conversation rose around it still.

**

And, back inside his hole of a flat, Grantaire slumped against a paper thin wall, and dug the heels of his hands into the sockets of his eyes, pressing them until he can see starbursts of light against his eyelids.

Right now, he will get another bottle, red this time, and drain it dry, drops falling from the corners of his mouth, too much like blood for comfort. Then he will fall into a wine-soaked sleep, and wake the next day and begin again, where he started.

What Grantaire does not know, however, is that his nights and canvases will be haunted by slashes of red and gold, and eyes bluer than a Grecian sea. And, that his dreams will be suffused with light fit enough to blind, and the faint, faint echo of age-old bullets.

Until, that is, until he meets his Apollo again.

**Author's Note:**

> ah. i dunno, if people enjoy this, i'll consider doing a series about it.
> 
> thanks for reading, though!


End file.
